Jim and Edrianna Stilwell's story of living in the North Carolina mountains enjoying their "green" lifestyle

Saturday, July 9, 2011

16 TONS AND WHAT DO YOU GET....

ADDING GRAVEL

Gravel was added after areas were graded. The first place was the driveway – the main driveway at the house. We actually have 3: the entrance which is a right-of-way and shared by several families, the house driveway, and the driveway for an area where we will park our motor home.

The right-of-way to our property is 18' wide - this truck barely fits.

It is pretty cool hearing it and seeing it coming.

I usually run down to the gate to let Ted in so he doesn't have to stop.

Ted took several trips with the big truck – holds 18 tons of “ABC” gravel. My guess was that the name meant – Already Been Crushed! I might be wrong. It is just crushed stone so it contains a lot of very tiny pebbles and dust. After it is packed down and dries it sort of gets hard – making it seem that some concrete was added, but it wasn’t.

Gravel at our camping site

Gravel at driveway next to the house.

Ted spreds out the gravel then tamps it down with THE CLAW!

I know it is a back hoe but I like calling it THE CLAW!!!!!

We had to have the gravel before the well drill arrived because it needed a good base. The well truck is scheduled to arrive on Tuesday July 12th – for real this time!

A side note: After we had a pretty good idea of the edge of the drive way for the motor home, Jim began constructing a fire pit with a set of steps on each side made of – guess what – stone! It looks great. So many large stones, a few too big to move, were moved out of their location to make the driveway. We have been gathering the stones that have been unearthed during the excavation process. We have lots of plans for them – this was just one of them. We are so grateful we don’t have to purchase extra rock to do some of the hard-scaping projects (projects where rock, large stones, bricks, etc are used).

This is Jim's biggest rock project to date.

It is so nice that we don't have to purchase them and have them delivered.

We have been creating piles of rocks through out the site so we can use them for future projects.